A study into Tiggers’ play preference
A.k.a how I try to stop myself from buying any random cat toys I see
Cats: an unpredictable creature
Meet the subject of this research - Tiggers, whom I have had the pleasure of “serving” for over 11 years. Tiggers has a wide assortment of toys that she likes to play with, and I’m looking to add a new one to her collection.
But it suddenly dawned on me: what determines how much she likes a toy? Does she even has a favorite type of toy? Or is it more about the placement of the toy or/and whether there are people around? There has never been any clear patterns I can see before.
So this is an attempt to explore Tiggers’ play preference by analyzing the amount of minutes she plays with a toy each day, along with the associated type of toy, location, hour of the day and whether there are people present.
First off: does she have a preference for any type of toys?
Let’s take a look at the distribution of Tigger’s playtime amongst each type of toy.
In detail, our household has a total of 14 toys, divided into five types:
Cat tunnel
Mobile toys (ping pong ball, bell mouse, crinkle mice, springs, paper frog, bizzy balls, sprite bottle cap, an old shoelace and a chain of zipties),
Stationary interactive toys (cat dancer and roller circuit toy)
Scratch post
Kicker toy (banana catnip toy)
Looking at the
graph, we can see that we have a clear winner here, which are the mobile
toys. You may look at this and thought: “Great, let’s get more mobile
toys for her then!”
But wait! Don’t forget there’s a
whopping 9 toys accounting for this category! The other categories
doesn’t seem that unpopular given their fewer variety. There’s no
definite most favorite toy type here, however one thing is for sure: she
doesn’t need more scratch post.
How about the location of the toy?
We were trying to look for a favorite type of toy but didn’t come up with any concrete answer. Maybe she just prefers to hang out in certain places?
Here’s a look into the distribution of playtime between the locations.
Looks
like she really likes to hang out in the living room. Seeing as the
living room only has two toys, this is unlikely to be influenced by the
sheer number of toys like the toy type. No wonder you can almost always
find her napping at the living room couch!
Looks like she isn’t a big fan of the outdoors too, even when there’s a plethora of toys available at her disposal. So it’s looking more like she just plays with whichever toys is available where she’s hanging out.
The power of pets and scratches
Seeing how dominant Tiggers likes to spend time in the bedroom and living room as opposed to the hallway and the yard got me to wondering if having people around to give her pets and scratches is what actually draws her there.
Here’s what her distribution of active playtime throughout the 24 hour in a day looks like when there are people present at each location vs when there are no one around:
It looks like when there are people around, she tends to be most active
around 10pm. This matches the usual time when someone would come watch
the TV or hangout in the living room, or when I come back home and have
the bedroom open for her to visit.
As for cases when no one is present, she is most active at 1am and around 2pm. Often at these time there’s either no one at home or we tend to stay in our respective room.
So it turns out she just prefers the living room and bedroom because she is more likely to get pets there.
